Alerts and notifications

August 29, 2018

Alerts are displayed in Director on the dashboard and other high level views with warning and critical alert symbols. Alerts are available for Platinum licensed Sites. Alerts update automatically every minute; you can also update alerts on demand.

A warning alert (amber triangle) indicates that the warning threshold of a condition has been reached or exceeded.

A critical alert (red circle) shows that the critical threshold of a condition has been reached or exceeded.

You can view more detailed information on alerts by selecting an alert from the sidebar, clicking the Go to Alerts link at the bottom of the sidebar or by selecting Alerts from the top of the Director page.

In the Alerts view, you can filter and export alerts. For example, Failed Server OS machines for a specific Delivery Group over the last month, or all alerts for a specific user. For more information, see Export reports.

Citrix alerts

Citrix alerts are alerts monitored in Director that originate from Citrix components. You can configure Citrix alerts within Director in Alerts > Citrix Alerts Policy. As part of the configuration, you can set notifications to be sent by email to individuals and groups when alerts exceed the thresholds you have set up. You can configure the notification as Octoblu webhooks, or SNMP traps also. For more information on setting up Citrix Alerts, see Create alerts policies.

Built-in alert policies

A set of built-in alert policies with predefined threshold values are available for Delivery Groups and Server OS VDAs scope. This feature requires Delivery Controller(s) version 7.18 or later. You can modify the threshold parameters of the built-in alert policies in Alerts > Citrix Alerts Policy.
These policies are created when there is at least one alert target -a Delivery Group or a Server OS VDA defined in your Site.

In case you upgrade Director and your Site, the alert policies from your previous Director instance are carried over. Built-in alert policies are created only if no corresponding alert rules exist in the Monitor database.

SCOM alerts

SCOM alerts display alert information from Microsoft System Center 2012 Operations Manager (SCOM) to provide a more comprehensive indication of data center health and performance within Director. For more information, see the Configure SCOM alerts integration section.

The number of alerts displayed next to the alerts icons before you expand the sidebar are the combined sum of Citrix and SCOM alerts.

Create alerts policies

To create a new alerts policy, for example, to generate an alert when a specific set of session count criteria are met:

Name and describe the policy, then set the conditions that have to be met for the alert to be triggered. For example, specify Warning and Critical counts for Peak Connected Sessions, Peak Disconnected Sessions, and Peak Concurrent Total Sessions. Warning values must not be greater than Critical values. For more information, see Alerts policies conditions.

Set the Re-alert interval. If the conditions for the alert are still met, the alert is triggered again at this time interval and, if set up in the alert policy, an email notification is generated. A dismissed alert does not generate an email notification at the re-alert interval.

Set the Scope. For example, set for a specific Delivery Group.

In Notification preferences, specify who should be notified by email when the alert is triggered. You have to specify an email server on the Email Server Configuration tab in order to set email Notification preferences in Alerts Policies.

Creating a policy with 20 or more Delivery Groups defined in the Scope might take approximately 30 seconds to complete the configuration. A spinner is displayed during this time.

Creating more than 50 policies for up to 20 unique Delivery Groups (1000 Delivery Group targets in total) might result in an increase in response time (over 5 seconds).

Moving a machine containing active sessions from one Delivery Group to another might trigger erroneous Delivery Group alerts that are defined using machine parameters.

Alerts policies conditions

Find below the alert categories, recommended actions to mitigate the alert, and built-in policy conditions if defined. The built-in alert policies are defined for alert and realert intervals of 60 minutes.

Peak Connected Sessions

Check Director Session Trends view for peak connected sessions.

Check to ensure that there is enough capacity to accommodate the session load.

Add new machines if needed

Peak Disconnected Sessions

Check Director Session Trends view for peak disconnected sessions.

Check to ensure that there is enough capacity to accommodate session load.

Peak Concurrent Total Sessions

Check to ensure that there is enough capacity to accommodate session load.

Add new machines if needed.

Log off disconnected sessions if needed

Percentage of CPU usage

Identify the processes or resources consuming CPU.

End the process if necessary.

Ending the process causes unsaved data to be lost.

If all is working as expected, add additional CPU resources in the future.

Note: The policy setting, Enable resource monitoring is allowed by default for the monitoring of CPU and memory performance counters on machines with VDAs. If this policy setting is disabled, alerts with CPU and memory conditions are not triggered. For more information, see Monitoring policy settings

Built-in policy conditions:

Scope: Delivery Group, Server OS scope

Threshold values: Warning - 80%, Critical - 90%

Memory

Percentage of Memory usage.

Identify the processes or resources consuming memory.

End the process if necessary. Ending the process causes unsaved data to be lost.

If all is working as expected, add additional memory in the future.

Note: The policy setting, Enable resource monitoring, is allowed by default for the monitoring of CPU and memory performance counters on machines with VDAs. If this policy setting is disabled, alerts with CPU and memory conditions are not triggered. For more information, see Monitoring policy settings

Built-in policy conditions:

Scope: Delivery Group, Server OS scope

Threshold values: Warning - 80%, Critical - 90%

Connection Failure Rate

Percentage of connection failures over the last hour.

Calculated based on the total failures to total connections attempted.

Configure alerts policies with Octoblu webhooks

Note: On Nov 29th, 2017, Citrix shutdown its free Octoblu.com Cloud Service. As a result, we recommend that you discontinue integrating Octoblu with Director. For more information on Citrix’s announcement to shut down Octoblu.com, see the blog, The Future of Octoblu and Citrix Workspace IoT.

Configure alerts policies with SNMP traps

When an alert configured with an SNMP trap trigger, the corresponding SNMP trap message is forwarded to the configured network listener for further processing. Citrix alerts support traps of SNMP version 2 and later. Currently, the trap message can be forwarded to one listener.

Note: This feature requires Delivery Controller(s) version 7.12 or later.

The structure of the OIDs in the SNMP trap messages from Director is as follows:
1.3.6.1.4.1.3845.100.1.<UID>
Here, <UID> is generated serially for every alert policy defined in Director. The OIDs are hence unique to each user environment.

Use 1.3.6.1.4.1.3845.100.1 to filter all trap messages from Director.

Use 1.3.6.1.4.1.3845.100.1.<UID> to filter and handle traps messages for specific alerts.

Use the following cmdlet to get the UIDs for the alert policies defined in your environment:

Get-MonitorNotificationPolicy

You can forward the SNMP traps to SCOM. To do this, configure SCOM with the Delivery Controller to listen to the trap messages.

Configure SCOM alerts integration

SCOM integration with Director lets you view alert information from SCOM on the Dashboard and in other high-level views in Director.

SCOM alerts are displayed on-screen alongside Citrix alerts. You can access and drill down into SCOM alerts from SCOM tab in the side bar.

You can view historical alerts up to one month old, sort, filter, and export the filtered information to CSV, Excel, and PDF report formats. For more information, see Export reports.

SCOM integration uses remote PowerShell 3.0 or later to query data from the SCOM Management Server and it maintains a persistent runspace connection in the user’s Director session. Director and SCOM server must have the same PowerShell version.

The requirements for SCOM integration are:

Windows Server 2012 R2

System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager

PowerShell 3.0 or later (PowerShell version on Director and the SCOM server must match)

Quad Core CPU with 16 GB RAM (recommended)

A primary Management Server for SCOM must be configured in the Director web.config file. You can do this using the DirectorConfig tool.

Note:

Citrix recommends that the Director administrator account is configured as a SCOM Operator role so that full alert information can be retrieved in Director. If this is not possible, a SCOM administrator account can be configured in the web.config file using the DirectorConfig tool.

Citrix recommends that you do not configure more than 10 Director administrators per SCOM Management Server to ensure optimal performance.

On the Director server:

Type Enable-PSRemoting to enable PowerShell remoting.

Add the SCOM Management Server to the TrustedHosts list. Open a PowerShell prompt and execute the following command(s):

Get the current list of TrustedHosts

Get-Item WSMAN:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts

Add the FQDN of the SCOM Management Server to the list of TrustedHosts. <Old Values> represents the existing set of entries returned from Get-Item cmdlet.

In User Roles, you can create a new User Role or modify an existing one. There are four categories of SCOM operator roles that define the nature of access to SCOM data. For example, a Read-Only role does not see the Administration pane and cannot discover or manage rules, machines or accounts. An Operator role is a full administrator role.

Note: The following operations are not available if the Director administrator is assigned to a non-operator role:

If there are multiple management servers configured and the primary management server is not available, the Director administrator cannot connect to the secondary management server. The primary management server is the server configured in the Director web.config file, that is the same server as the one specified with the DirectorConfig tool in step 3 above. The secondary management servers are peer management servers of the primary server.

While filtering alerts, the Director administrator cannot search for the alert source. This requires an operator level permission.

To modify any User Role, right-click on the role, then click Properties.

In the User Role Properties dialog, you can add or remove Director administrators from the specified user role.

Add Director administrators to the Remote Management Users group on the SCOM Management server. This allows the Director administrators to establish a remote PowerShell connection.

Type Enable-PSRemoting to enable PowerShell remoting.

Set the WS-Management properties limits:

Modify MaxConcurrentUsers:

In CLI:

winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxConcurrentUsers = "20"}

In PS:

Set­-Item WSMan:\localhost\Shell\MaxConcurrentUsers 20

Modify MaxShellsPerUser:

In CLI:

winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxShellsPerUser="20"}

In PS:

Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Shell\MaxShellsPerUser 20

Modify MaxMemoryPerShellMB:

In CLI:

winrm set winrm/config/winrs @{MaxMemoryPerShellMB="1024"}

In PS:

Set­-Item WSMan:\localhost\Shell\MaxMemoryPerShellMB 1024

To ensure that SCOM integration works in mixed domain environments, set the following registry entry.

Caution: Editing the registry incorrectly can cause serious problems that might require you to reinstall your operating system. Citrix cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk. Be sure to back up the registry before you edit it.

Once SCOM integration is set up you might see the message “Cannot get the latest SCOM alerts. View the Director server event logs for more information”. The server event logs help identify and correct the problem. Causes can include:

Loss of network connectivity at the Director or SCOM machine.

The SCOM service is not available or too busy to respond.

Failed authorization due to a change in permissions for the configured user.

An error in Director while processing the SCOM data.

PowerShell version mismatch between Director and SCOM server.

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